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Sīli
General information The Sīli language (or sometimes: Silian) is spoken by the Sīl people who live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. The island and its people were only discovered by European sailors in the late 19th century. Sīli is a highly inflected language that is not related to any language on the entire planet. Phonology Vowels Monophthongs Sīli possesses 11 vowels: 10 oral vowels and 1 nasal vowel. The oral vowels are arranged in 5 pairs (each pair has one short and one long vowel): *a and a: *ɛ and e: *ɪ and i: *ɔ and o: *ʊ and u: The vowel ə is sometimes added after words ending in a voiced consonant to make their pronunciation easier but Sīli people do not consider it a "true" vowel. Diphthongs All diphthongs of Sīli start with an existing monophthong and end in one of three non-existent monophthongs: ɐ̯, ɪ̯ or ʊ̯. The nasal vowel cannot form any diphthong. The vowels a and a: cannot form a diphthong with ɐ̯. All other oral vowels can form diphthongs with ɐ̯. Only the vowels a and ɔ can form diphthongs with ɪ̯ and ʊ̯. Consonants All Silian consonants are short. However, since consonant length doesn't matter, consonant length can sometimes be lengthened for various reasons, e. g. comedy, stress, anger (etc.). Stress The stress of a Silian word is usually on the penultimate syllable. However, if the penultimate contains a short vowel / diphthong and there are long vowels / diphthongs in the word, the stress usually shifts to the first long vowel / diphthong. Phonotactics Silian phonotactics are pretty "easy" - every syllable contains a vowel or diphthong (of some sort) in its nucleus and (optionally) one or more consonants in onset and coda. The long nasal vowel can only appear in the end of words. Consonant clusters can be basically any combination of consonants - the only rule is that clusters can contain either only voiced plosives, fricatives and affricates or only voiceless plosives fricatives and affricates. Orthography Alphabet Sīli doesn't use any capital letters - everything is written lower case letters. Long vowels are written as the corresponding short vowel letter + a makron (¯). Verbs General information Verbs are by far the most important - and also complexe - part of speech in Sīli. However, all verbs are regular and follow the same conjugational pattern. Silian verbs are conjugated for person, number, tense, voice, mood and aspect. The person, number and voice systems are 100% the same as in English and the tense system differs only slightly. The real problem are the mood and aspect systems which are more complexe and very different from English. Conjugation The conjugation of aspects is a little trickier: Every verb has a lexical aspect that is considered the "standard" - and this aspect is conjugated according to the table above. The other aspect is created by adding the prefix ała- to the verb. Nouns and pronouns General information Nouns and pronouns are declinated the same way. They are declined for number, case and gender. The number and gender systems are the same as in Latin or German - however, the case system is a bit different. Declension